At the urging of several Evanston City Council members, officials will include all the city’s parks in an ambitious project to assess their condition.
City officials had initially recommended the city contract with the Lakota Group for $40,000 to collect data at 36 park sites, including two in green areas around District 65 schools.
But at council members urging, the city will double its allocation to $80,000 to cover all the city sites in the study.
In discussion at the council’s Administration and Public Works Committee meeting Monday, Ald. Ann Rainey, 8th, played a key role in prompting the change, asking why no parks in her south side ward were on the list.
“When I looked at this, I thought there was going to be another page,” she said of the proposal. “It can’t be possible that no parks south of Oakton aren’t listed. It’s shocking.”
In 2015, the city’s Parks and Recreation Board recommended to the city council that a park and community outdoor space “score card” be completed in 2016 to assess the cleanliness, safety, physical structures, appearance and functionality of open spaces.
Parks and Recreation Board members pushed for the process with some parks with high needs not being addressed under the city’s normal process of funding capital improvement projects.
The score card “will objectively and quantitatively measure the quality of park infrastructure and maintenance in order to ensure the highest level of service possible,” Lawrence Hemingway, the city’s director of parks, recreation and community services, wrote in a memo. “It will provide staff with a road map to direct resources that address the most emergent needs programmatically and provide information on suggested park improvements in future years.”
Addressing the committee Monday, Robert Dorneker, the city’s assistant director of parks and recreation, said officials wished they could have added more sites to the list for the first phase but made their selection based on the parks with highest use, as determined through internal analysis.
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But Rainey argued some sites not on the list qualified under the criteria officials were using.
Ald. Brian Miller, 9th, another committee member, indicated he was comfortable going with the staff plan, but Ald. Melissa Wynne, 3rd, joined Rainey, in support, arguing it made more sense to do all the sites at the same time.
City officials, at the direction of the Parks and Recreation Board, also favored that approach, stressed City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz.
He indicated officials were flexible, inviting aldermen to give him a number to work with.
From a staff perspective, he said, “We really see this as building block for the next city council as it moves forward with very longer-term capital planning, because clearly, how we are going to get enough money to meet all our needs is a very, very big question.”
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